Fort McMurray — Fire 9 now surrounded the city. Pushed by the great northwest winds and pulled by the parched forest on this northern city’s edge, the final thrust of Fire 9’s encircling movement came in the late evening of Thursday, May 4, 2016.

The heaviest, driest, fastest winds had roared into the deserted city during the late afternoon that same day.

Those winds did not relent through the night but blew Fire 9 around the northwestern edge of the city, down the Athabasca River and across the Clearwater River on the city’s eastern border. It then moved south down the Clearwater valley, carpet bombing the downtown on the flats with embers.

At the Regional Emergency Operations Centre in Firehall 5 in the south end of Fort McMurray, fire operations chief Jody Butz sent out a call to all firefighters that night: “All hands on deck. Everybody up. Everybody move now.”

The firefighters had been hard at it for 30 hours straight. They worked in a city empty of all but emergency responders, the small group of civilians helping them and a handful of residents who refused to leave.

With shovel and hose fire crews scrambled to extinguish spot fires wherever the embers landed. But the fire didn’t rest. Through the evening, it took off from the city into the crisp boreal forest, charging with the wind southeast, kilometre after kilometre through the kindling crowns of the spruce and aspen poplar.It moved in secret, in the dark and away from roads and homes.

Unaware of Fire 9’s rapid run,emergency operations commander Dale Bendfeld left Butz at Firehall 5, which was now surrounded by smoke and fire. He headed out to join up with the rest of the leadership team, fire Chief Darby Allan and Chris Graham, the municipality’s assistant deputy chief for emergency management.

The group had made the call earlier on May 4 to evacuate the Regional Emergency Operations Centre.

They planned to re-establish the command post in a safer spot at the Nexen Long Lake oilsands operational headquarters in the boreal forest 40 km southeast of Fort McMurray.

It is unusual to move an operations centre during a civil emergency in Canada, but from his extensive military background, the retreat was perfectly logical to Bendfeld. An army needed order and leadership. That could not happen if the command centre was out of action.

Bendfeld had eaten sporadically and not had any significant sleep in four days, since the fire first flared on May 1, and he’d promised Mayor Melissa Blake he would do all he could to stop it. Bendfeld had fought fires, faced emergencies and tight spots around Canada and in Afghanistan, but battling to save his own home and city had a far different, more urgent feel.

The last run of buses sit empty during the mandatory evacuation at Anzac Recreation Centre in Anzac, Alta., on Thursday May 5, 2016.

When he arrived at Nexen, he found his staff scattered everywhere. Just then, he couldn’t find Allen, who was in the nearby village of Anzac briefing Premier Rachel Notley on the disaster. Instead, Bendfeld came upon groups of staffers now questioning their purpose. A lot of folks who had stepped up at theRegional Emergency Operations Centre now wanted out. Most had been with no sleep or little sleep for several days. Some were certain their houses were gone.

“I need to get down south and see my family,” they said. “I’m done here. I’ve done everything I can do.”

Bendfeld responded bluntly, that he still needed their help, that he, Allen and Graham could not do this on their own.

Yes, your wife might be upset, he said, but she’s safe, your family is safe, and you’re needed here to stay and fight this thing.

What in hell is going on with this fire? Just when we had it stopped, it comes at us with something new. It never does what anyone says

Dale Bendfeld

They all needed to come to the operations meeting, Bendfeld said, which he was now organizing. There everyone would get up to speed on the latest developments of the wildfire.

At the same time, Bendfeld started to get repeated calls from Wood Buffalo Coun. Jane Stroud.

Stroud lived in Anzac, a hamlet of 800 located three km away. Stroud was at Anzac’s recreation centre, which had been set up as an emergency relief centre and was housing hundreds of fire evacuees from Fort McMurray.

“Are we OK?” she asked Bendfeld, saying folks were worried about the fire spreading.

“You’ve got 24 hours, it’s going to give you some time,” Bendfeld said, explaining he had been told by the provincial fire specialists that the fire was 32 km away.

Bendfeld put her off, but she kept calling. Stroud had been up in a helicopter earlier in the afternoon and had seen the fire was still far away on the horizon over Fort McMurray, but now she sensed something was wrong. She had parked herself in a rec centre room near the temporary local emergency response office. Through the evening, local firefighters kept looking out the window at the darkening horizon. A few of the RCMP officers started to say it was time to evacuate Anzac, no matter if any official order had yet come down.

“People are getting nervous, there is a lot of concern here,” she told Bendfeld, and at last her tone and insistence made Bendfeld realize he must act. He promised to drive over to Anzac himself and address any questions.

“That would be great,” Stroud said. “If you come and talk to people, they will calm down.”

He left theRegional Emergency Operations Centre meeting for Chris Graham to run. With his fiancéSabrina Caterini, an RCMP officer, Bendfeld walked outside into an industrial yard to see a shocking sight — a massive rolling cloud of dark smoke approaching in the twilight, fire glowing red at its base, a wall of flames many kilometres wide and not many kilometres away.

A rebuilt home and cut down fire damaged trees from the 2016 wildfires are seen in the Lone Pine Estates in Anzac on April 9, 2017.

Holy crap, Bendfeld thought. I do not have 24 hours. This is a now situation. We have got to move.

He and Caterini got in Bendfeld’s car and floored it to Anzac. When they got there, smoke framed the Welcome to Anzac sign. Dark columns billowed on the horizon. The red glow of flame reflected off the waters of nearby Gregoire Lake.

Bendfeld pulled into the recreation centre to see people milling about, looking up at the fire cloud. At once, he met with Stroud and other community leaders and said he was issuing an immediate evacuation order.

Bendfeld also put in a call to Tim Reid, an old Fort McMurray connection who was running the evacuation centre at Edmonton Northlands. He told Reid to get ready for yet more buses of evacuees.

The evacuation of the communities around Gregoire Lake— Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates and the nearby Fort McMurray First Nation 468 — unfolded with little complaint. By now everyone had fixed in their head that this fire waited for no one in its path.

As the dark of night closed in, Bendfeld got a call from Graham at the Nexen office.

“Are you done?” Graham asked.

“No, I’m still evacuating here.”

“Well, we are out of here.”

“What do you mean, ‘We are out of here’?”

“The fire has come around Anzac and now it’s coming to Nexen Long Lake We’ve got to get out of here.”

Allen and Graham had decided they must evacuate Nexen and set up the operations centre down the highway. At this late hour, the only available accommodation well out of the range of the spring fire was Lac La Biche, three hours down Highway 818.

Graham set off down the highway on his own. He’d been awake for days now. In the pitch black of night, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. For a moment, with the necessity of leadership set aside and his only task a long car ride on his own, fatigue took over. He felt numb and alone, but also deep sorrow for all that had been lost.What just happened? Oh my god, what just happened?

Bendfeld was also crashing. His work done in Anzac, he and Caterini returned to Nexen to pick up a second car they had left there. Flame shot up around the camp. Smoke inundated it. All the lights were on. Food was still out on tables and desks inside. All the people had emptied out. The evacuation alarm kept sounding. The place seemed spooky now.

Back on the main highway, Bendfeld thought about going north to the camps or down to Lac La Biche. He could not get Allen or Graham on the phone. For the first time, he felt drained. He had to drive three hours now, but to where? Why wasn’t anyone calling him?

I’m on my own here.

That’s what the fire did to everyone in the end, from the firefighter on the front line to the commander at the top. At some point, the enormity of this fire of utter gloom as darkness itself made all of them feel small and alone.

Anger welled up in Bendfeld.What in hell is going on with this fire? Just when we had it stopped, it comes at us with something new. It never does what anyone says.

It jumped the river. It burned through the aspen and the muskeg. It burned through the night. It came at us from everywhere, from all directions, like some three-headed monster.

Darby Allen had taken to calling the fire a beast, as if it were a living entity, with an ill will bent on consuming all. Bendfeld thought that was fitting.

He and Caterini turned their cars to Lac La Biche. He followed her in his vehicle. As they drove down the gloomy road, she honked from time to time to keep him alert and on track.

They pulled into Lac La Biche at sunrise. It, too, had a surreal feel to it, a brand-new building, brightly lit, full of happy people, eager to help, untouched by the trauma of the fire.

“I need to find the REOC,” Bendfeld told them, but no one knew what or where that was. The Fort McMurray fire operations people who had come at night were scattered and sleeping throughout the complex, he was told.

Sleeping?!

Bendfeld felt a jolt of anger and cursed.

Just then, a Fort McMurray firefighter approached with a solemn face. “Hey Dale,” he said. “Stonecreek went up last night. We lost your house. Everything is gone.”

Bendfeld took in the news, then went outside to be alone. He did not want his fiancé to see him just now. He broke down weeping. What was he going to tell her?

The wildfire moves towards Anzac from Fort McMurray on May 4, 2016.

After gathering himself, he took her aside and told Caterini the news.

“It’s just a house,” she said quietly.

It was just what Bendfeld needed to hear. Caterini’s resilience and support meant everything to him just then. She got him some bacon for breakfast and prodded him about what the next steps should be.

Bendfeld was back on track, ready to keep fighting.

Dale Bendfeld, Executive Director of Community and Protective Services for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, speaks about the 2016 Fort McMurray fires in his office in Fort McMurray on Tuesday, April 4, 2017.

Epilogue

In the end, the fire ran 40 km from Fort McMurray to Anzac on May 4 and 5.

Due to the work of Anzac’s fire department led by Travis Cramer, the hamlet lost only a dozen homes and 19 structures to the fire that morning. Pressed up against the flames, a dozer guard was cut north of Willow Lake to protect the communities. In Fort McMurray firefighters also successfully stopped any major new fires.

On Friday, May 6, 2016, Darby Allen told reporters: “The Beast is still up — it’s surrounding the city.”

But Fire 9 never seriously threatened Fort McMurray again. It grewthroughout the Fort McMurray region, but by May 10 Allen reported that he thought they had the fire beat in the city itself.

In the end, it burned 2,656 of the city’s 29,569 dwellings, almost all of them burning in the chaos right after the fire blew in on May 3. Bendfeld learned that the report of his own home burning was inaccurate, that his own place was still standing.

This past February, Allen retired, with Butz taking his place.

Today, if you ask Butz how much of Fort McMurray might have been lost without the work of the firefighters, he has an emphatic answer.

Emergency officials started getting concerned calls from Anzac residents about the approaching fire.

“Without question, I have no doubt, that the whole place would be gone.”

Many firefighters have struggled with health and stress issues related to Fire 9, but the general consensus is things are back to normal for most of them.

The severity of Fire 9 pushed many to their limit, some to breaking. Its seemingly supernatural force reduced many to feel small and inadequate. But the groups of people who came together to fight most fiercely against the wildfire also bonded.

As Chris Graham, who led theRegional Emergency Operations Centrewith Allen and Bendfeld, now says: “The family that fought the fire — that is Fort McMurray.”